We’ve all got one or two gaps when it comes to those established ‘must-owns’ of music history, but even we were a bit surprised to hear that The War on Drugs’ Robbie Bennett would ‘have a meltdown’ if asked to name just a few songs from The Beatles’ legendary final album, Abbey Road.
Talking to Bennett about the making of his upcoming pair of sonically exquisite solo albums, Steloken and Circulation, he was explaining how his approach to creativity was governed by instinct, and how he’d relied on the quirky Soma Terra synth to “create chaos in real time”.
During the conversation, Bennett admitted that although his knowledge of music is fairly vast, he’s clearly not massive on the world’s most treasured band.
“As a scholar of music, I’m not very scholarly,” Robbie told us. “I have listened to the entire canon of ambient and jazz – but if you asked me to name a few songs off Abbey Road I’d probably have a meltdown – I wouldn’t be able to do it.”
Bennett elaborated that, to him, music was a much more instinctual thing.
“I absorb everything I hear and translate it back via my fingers, this is how I’ve always liked to communicate. I don’t do many interviews as I’m not a man of many words. But all these limitations, they help you use your ears and how you listen, I think a lot more about music and how I want to experience it.”
Robbie also told us that he likes his own compositions to be more exploratory and not limited by repetition, something he puts down to his psychology:
“I’m a claustrophobic guy, when I go to the supermarket, I will park my car far from the entrance so I’m not near anyone, and that’s how my music is too,” Robbie told us. “It’s not that I don’t want familiar themes to repeat – I do – but I don’t like it on a loop and my gear has let me do this. If I was utilising looping pedals, I’d be making different records. I think the amount of chaos and the way these records react and decay is really great for me.”
To this end Robbie devised a way of chaining the MIDI from his piano to an external synth. “The real thing that happened when I was playing was this idea of chaining the MIDI out of the piano into the synth,” Robbie explained. “I could play a synth, use a lot of reverbs and listen to it bloom as it held, then decay before I made my next move. It meant I really considered each step and gave every element a lot of space.”
